Dear readers,
I recently celebrated my birthday, and when I mention it to my friends and acquaintances, they always seem puzzled and a little hurt. They wonder if I had a party and didn’t invite them. The truth is, I have a condition called “summer birthday disorder”. This disorder makes me resist celebrating my personal anniversary with those who already know and love me.
As a child with a July birthday, I never got the chance to bring cupcakes to school like other kids. Then, as a teenager, my friends would be away at the Jersey Shore or attending summer programs for college applications. Even after finishing university, I continued to delay actual birthday parties because I stayed late at graduate school.
Several more years passed, and I found myself celebrating my birthday with new friends I met in language schools in Russia and Eastern Europe. The American birthday song was replaced by the melancholic tune sung by Gena the Crocodile from the Soviet cartoon “Cheburashka”. In this scene, Gena, a lonely crocodile, sings a birthday song on a rainy day to a solitary audience of a truck driver parked on his street. Despite the loneliness, Gena is joyful and sings, “It’s worth a tear, that one’s birthday comes just once a year.”
I resonate with this feeling. For a long time, I got used to hearing the Crocodile birthday song from people I had barely known for a week, yet we spent every day together during the long summer days.
Recently, my life has become more settled. I now sign leases and stay in one place throughout the year. While I struggle with this permanence, especially as the weather gets warmer, I find myself longing for those past summers spent with strangers, for the simple gesture of someone who doesn’t even know my last name making sure we all meet at a bar around the corner from the language school to toast my birthday. I miss the intensity of those fleeting relationships that disappeared so suddenly, just like time.
Now, the only way I can capture that feeling again is through fiction. I rely on novels that evoke the symptoms of my summer birthday disorder: a hot kind of loneliness, a cooling down of expectations, and the clash of emotions, like sharing an umbrella with a stranger, cheek to cheek.
In Vendela Vida’s “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty”, we meet an American woman traveling to Casablanca. Within minutes of her arrival, her bag containing her computer and wallet is stolen, along with all her identification. She embarks on a journey to recover her belongings and escape from a personal disaster that occurred in Florida. The novel explores the way violence can transform a person’s worldview and lead to new identities.
On the other hand, Cristina Rivera Garza’s “The Taiga Syndrome” takes us to the taiga, a boreal forest located south of the Arctic Circle. The novel follows an ex-detective turned novelist as she searches for a missing couple. The taiga she encounters is not the romanticized remote wilderness; instead, it is a broken landscape destroyed by deforestation and illegal activities serving the logging industry.
Both novels capture the tension between sadness and adventure, showcasing the complexities of living life fully and voraciously. Sometimes, our actions may seem like absence to those we leave behind, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of our personal journeys.
If you’re interested in exploring more books, I recommend “A Separation” and “Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura, as well as “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” by Peter Høeg. These books delve into similar themes and offer captivating narratives.
Lastly, why not try something different and recite a recipe? In Henry Notaker’s “A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries”, he explores the popularity of rhyming recipes to help commit instructions to memory. It’s a unique way to engage with culinary traditions.
I hope you find joy and inspiration in these recommendations. Remember, sometimes the best way to celebrate is by immersing ourselves in stories.
Wishing you a wonderful day,
Jennifer Wilson
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